The #Art of the Hashtag

Thanks to Twitter, the hashtag has become an important linguistic shortcut. But while everyone from Robin Thicke to Beyoncé has used the symbol as part of their art, only a few have truly taken advantage of its culture-jamming possibilities.

Time moves quickly on the internet, so we are already overdue for a moratorium—and a subsequent nostalgic reflection—on something that happened 10 months ago. You might remember the summer of 2013 as the summer of hashtags in song titles or, depending on how much time you spent outside, the summer of internetthinkpiecesabout hashtags in song titles. In hindsight, the timing makes sense; crowning a Song of the Summer is a fun-but-shameless pageant, and the list of hashtag hopefuls reads like a parade of contenders waving the flags of their own built-in PR campaigns: Mariah Carey and Miguel's "#Beautiful", Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull's video for "#LiveItUp", Miley Cyrus's "#GETITRIGHT", and Busta Rhymes' "#Twerkit", to name a few. The ever technologically overzealous will.i.am doubled down, releasing a single with Justin Bieber called "#thatPOWER", off his record #willpower.

The hashtag as we know it dates back to July 2009, and early uses of the symbol centered around uniting niche communities and political organizing, like the Arab Spring protests. In short order, advertisers and network broadcasters caught on and began placing omnipresent hashtagged "bugs" in the bottom corner of screens. Musicians are some of the most popular Twitter users, and tweets have been influencing rappers' cadences for years (Kanye West, Drake, and Big Sean have each claimed to have invented “hashtag rap,” while some argue that the flow is as old as rap itself), so it's almost surprising that it took until last year for actual hashtags in song titles to trend.

I do not think we will ever see a summer like the #SummerOf2013 again, because this experiment didn't exactly work—none of these songs became huge hits. (Ironically, the eventual song of the summer, Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines", knowingly parodied hashtag mania in its video.) There were early warnings that hashtag song titles lead only to annoyance and confusion. Take synth-pop act Cobra Starship's 2011 single "#1Nite"—while the song's trend-friendly title was ahead of its time, a hashtag preceding a number wasn't the smartest idea, and many perplexed fans and radio DJs took to calling the song "Number One Night".

Many of the 2013 hashtag songs lead to similar dissonance, probably because their would-be trending topics were too vague and too common. When you search #willpower, you do not see throngs of fans tweeting their love of will.i.am's latest album, but instead people evangelizing the virtues of e-cigarettes and complaining about how hard it is to give up sweets for Lent. The "#LiveItUp" stream is awash with Twitpics of mani-pedis and YOLO-esque musings on the transience of youth ("high school will be done before you know it so #liveitup"); quite predictably, the star of a "#Twerkit" search is not Busta Rhymes. These songs have now outlived their trending moments (if they ever had them to begin with), which makes something about the hashtags that permanently affix their titles feel desperate and sad. They have an air of Gretchen Wieners, forever trying to make "fetch" happen.

The oddest and perhaps most tragic case is "#Beautiful", the best song in the bunch. Most of these other #2013 songs sound cloyingly of-the-moment, but Mariah and Miguel's breezy Motown homage feels timeless—it's the kind of song that a wedding DJ could easily segue into "Build Me Up Buttercup" or "My Girl". Twenty years from now, it'll sound every bit as great as it sounds this afternoon, but thanks to its bad tattoo of a title, "#Beautiful" is forever doomed to show its age.

If you have any doubt that the hashtag is a frighteningly powerful tool in our modern vocabulary, imagine a person you care about texting you that song's title line out of the blue: "You're beautiful." Now think of the same person texting, "You're #beautiful." The second one is jokey, ironic, distant—and hey, maybe that's what that person was going for. But it also hammers home that point that the internet too often asserts: You're not as original as you once thought. "Beautiful" is analog, unquantifiable, one-in-a-million. #Beautiful, on the other hand, is crowded terrain. Ten more people have just tweeted about something or someone #beautiful since you started reading this sentence.

And yet, I feel compelled to defend the hashtag, if only for the selfish reason that I've noticed it creeping into my thoughts, my speech, and my non-Twitter vocabulary, and I want to believe I'm not crazy. (Or the punchline of a Jimmy Fallon skit.) Seems like I'm not alone, at least: "The hashtag," D.T. Max wrote in a recent New Yorker profile of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, "has become so popular that people often insert jokey ones into their emails." Guilty as charged. My text messages to friends are now dotted with goofy, unclickable hashtags, and right before I sat down to write this I dashed off an email to a friend with a link to something we'd been talking about earlier, with the subject line: "#relevant." Why not just "Relevant"? Well, for one thing, "#relevant" feels more casual, more intimate, more knowingly ironic—like you're shrugging off any claim to profundity. You aware that you're not one-in-a-million; you're in on that cosmic joke.

A common complaint used to be that there was no way to express sarcasm on the internet. Half a million people belong to a Facebook group called We Need A Sarcasm Font, and I'm sure a much larger number than that has experienced some kind of fight, misunderstanding, or needless worry over something someone said to them online that they read the wrong way. We're working on it, though.

As more and more of our daily interactions become text-based—people preferring texting to phone calls, workplaces that rely heavily email and instant messaging—we're developing ways to stretch our written language so it can communicate more nuance, so we can tell people what we mean without accidentally leading them on or pissing them off. Periods have become more forceful, commas less essential, and over the last few years, the hashtag has morphed into something resembling the fabled sarcasm font—the official keystroke of irony. Putting a hashtag in front of something you text, email, or IM to someone is a sly way of saying "I'm joking," or maybe more accurately, "I mean this and I don't at the same time." This is why the comedically oversized "#THICKE" that fills the screen in the "Blurred Lines" video speaks the language of the hashtag better than the comparatively earnest #willpower or "#LiveItUp". #THICKE knows its own absurdity, and it knows that you know its absurdity, but on some level it would still very much like you to tweet about Robin Thicke.

Irony gets a bad rap thanks to ugly mustaches and unfunny t-shirts, but it can actually be liberating—a playful freedom from the straitjacket of always meaning exactly what you say. It can also be an expression of dissent. As quickly as companies realized that they could use the hashtag as an advertising tool, Twitter users realized that they could use sponsored hashtags as a way to talk back to the whole idea of being sold to. As far as culture-jamming goes, its revolutionary potential is admittedly mild—the less risky and more legal equivalent of graffiti-ing a subway ad. But it's heartening to see that pretty much any major ad campaign's hashtag gets hijacked by people complaining about how dumb that ad campaign is. My personal recent favorite was KFC's #IAtetheBones, a slogan for boneless chicken wings quickly that devolved—or evolved—into a stream of sexual innuendo and jokes about cannibalism. The latest instance of this is Sprint's campaign for their new “friends and family plan” which hawks the hashtag #framily; most of the tweets in the #framily feed make fun of the ad executives who are desperately trying to make “#framily” happen.

Hashtags open up the potential of allowing the consumer to influence the ad campaign—or the TV show, or the song. But it’s also worth asking if this is this necessarily a good thing. Since the great failure of the #SongoftheSummer2013, the next experiment might be to make songs out of hashtags that are already popular, in attempts to make surefire hits from focus-grouped sentiments. Will this year's hopefuls be more like R&B singer Rico Love's "Bitches Be Like" (inspired by the popular #BitchesBeLike hashtag), or Pharrell's new duet with Miley Cyrus "Come and Get It Bae" (a wink to a favorite online term of endearment)? On the internet, we tend to talk about "connection" as something unequivocally positive, but constant connection can also stifle creativity and originality by making artists too self-aware, too concerned with metrics, too eager to please.

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If there's a sweet spot between being obliviously disconnected and desperately hashtag-crazed, nothing has hit it with more precision than Beyoncé. In a world of SoundCloud mixes and Bandcamp pages, the surprise album is more like a sponsored Tumblr post—a sleek, unabashedly expensive-sounding record that speaks the internet's language without ever pandering for likes. The Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche TED Talk in the middle of "***Flawless", for instance, appears with sudden and delightful incongruence, like an artful photo Tumblr reblogging a dense block quote.

I will admit that something about "***Flawless" bothered me the first few times I heard it. Coming right after Adiche’s critique of the different social expectations we hold for women and men, the quotable refrain “Ladies, tell ‘em, ‘I woke up like this’” struck me as a mixed message. It felt unwittingly conservative, the way that the “Single Ladies” chorus (“If you liked then you shoulda put a ring on it”) paid lip service to empowering single women but in the end just felt like an endorsement of eventually “putting a ring on it.” The Beyoncé we see even in her most “candid” moments (or the song’s comparatively unpolished video) definitely did not wake up like this. For Beyoncé to deny the effort it takes to look like Beyoncé seems like another way of keeping those unrealistic expectations about femininity in place. How can you quote a speech about the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes one moment, and then shrug off the invisible but very real labor that goes into looking hot?

My initial read of the song, though, was too literal. As #WokeUpLikeThis has become one of the record’s most popular memes, I’ve come to appreciate the phrase’s irony and complexity. (The exaggerated, imminently gif-able way she delivers the line in the video gives a hint she doesn’t want us to take this statement too sincerely.) #WokeUpLikeThis is a perfect instance of “I mean this and I don’t at the same time”—a way to both point towards the tyrannical digital-era expectation that women should always be camera-ready, while at the same time celebrating the art of looking (and feeling) so goddamn fine. These are not contradictions, but the complexities of a feminism that comes from lived experience rather than hollow, you’re-with-us-or-you’re-against-us sloganeering. Beyoncé**’s perspective reminds me of something the writer Joan Morgan called for in her 1997 hip-hop feminist manifesto When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: “a feminism brave enough to fuck with the grays.”

The ubiquitous hashtags that Beyoncé has spawned—#surfbort, #flawless, #wokeuplikethis—now feel inevitable, but they weren’t screaming “tweet me!” in our faces the way “#LiveItUp” and #willpower were. We had to dig them out, so in a way, we completed them. (Enter Soundboart.) The #WokeUpLikeThis meme feels like a genuinely collaborative effort—an example of how a hashtag can enrich a song’s meaning rather than cheapen it. Beyoncé reminds me of something else Morgan says in Chickenheads, which was written more than a decade before the hashtag but somehow captures its slippery, collaborative spirit. "Trying to capture the voice of all that is young black female was impossible," she writes. "My goal, instead, was to tell my truth as best I could from my vantage point on the spectrum. And then get you to talk about it. This book by its lonesome won't give you the truth. Truth is what happens when your cumulative voices fill in the breaks, provide the remixes, and rework the chorus."